Gaspar de Crayer

He was a court painter to the governors of the Southern Netherlands and worked in the principal cities of Flanders where he helped spread the Rubens style.

[4] His mother Christina van Abshoven or Apshoven descended from a family of painters who at the time enjoyed some fame, but whose work is barely known now.

He is believed to have studied under Raphael Coxie, the court painter of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands Albert VII, Archduke of Austria and Isabella Clara Eugenia.

Although he was still living in Brussels, he played a leading role in the coordination of the monumental decorations for the Joyous Entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, brother of King Philip IV of Spain, as governor of the Spanish Netherlands in 1635.

He created one of the two triumphal arches on the Vrijdagmarkt in Ghent, depicting scenes of the illustrious deeds of Ferdinand's Ghent-born great-grandfather Charles V.[5] The Cardinal-Infante made him his first court painter in the same year.

He also received in 1647 a commission from Dutch architect Jacob van Campen to assist in the decoration of Huis ten Bosch, the palace of stadtholder Frederick Henry in The Hague.

Another important foreign patron was the German Catholic ruler Maximilian Willibald of Waldburg-Wolfegg, for whom de Crayer executed several large altarpieces for the churches in the Palatinate between 1658 and 1666.

[2] Gaspar de Crayer mainly painted portraits of the elite and Counter Reformation altarpieces for local and foreign churches.

In the 1650s and 1660s, de Crayer's art became more emotionally loaded and more dramatic through the deployment of a relatively large number of figures at various planes within the picture space.